I started this and every article I’ve written by using a framework that I’ve adapted from some of the great internet writers I know. Likewise, I start every project by outlining my guiding principles, key assumptions, and core risks. Frameworks have been my go-to for so long, I can’t remember a day when I didn’t use one.
Taking a systematic approach has helped me make meaning of things and take action. In short, it helps me make sense of things so I can be effective and efficient in my life.
According to Karl Weick, an organizational theorist, this is called sensemaking.
In short, sensemaking is the act of “putting stimuli into frameworks” so one can better “comprehend, understand, explain, attribute, extrapolate, and predict.”
It is the active or passive way of using what we observe and learn and making meaning from it. Sensemaking is digesting information and using it for our benefit.
Brian Arthur illustrates a splendid example of how sensemaking unfolds in his casino analogy:
Imagine you are milling about in a large casino with the top figures of high tech. . . . Over at one table, a game is starting called Multimedia. Over at another is a game called Web Services. There are many such tables. You sit at one.
“How much to play?” you ask. “Three billion,” the croupier replies.
“Who’ll be playing?” you ask. “We won’t know until they show up,” he replies.
“What are the rules?” “These will emerge as the game unfolds,” says the croupier.
“What are the odds of winning?” you wonder.
“We can’t say,” responds the house. “Do you still want to play?”
Though high stakes for most of us, this story exemplifies the type of uncertainty and unknowing we face daily. Faced with our reality, we ask questions, learn, and then take some action.
In our lives, sensemaking takes the form of the meaning-making constructs of narratives, frameworks, and scientific models.
Many parties use these constructs to incite action and create meaning. When these constructs are rooted in reality and truth, they lead to informed and effective action. At other times, these constructs lead to negative outcomes.
The properties of sensemaking
According to Weick, the act of sensemaking can be distilled into 7 distinct properties. In her article about sensemaking in organizations, Laura McNamara interprets these as such:
Sensemaking is a matter of identity: it is who we understand ourselves to be in relation to the world around us.
Sensemaking is retrospective: we shape experience into meaningful patterns according to our memory of experience.
How and what becomes sensible depends on our socialization: where we grew up in the world, how we were taught to be in the world, where we are located now in the world, the people with whom we are currently interacting.
Sensemaking is a continuous flow; it is ongoing, because the world, our interactions with the world, and our understandings of the world are constantly changing. You might also think of sensemaking as perpetually emergent meaning and awareness.
Sensemaking builds on extracted cues that we apprehend from sense and perception. Cognition is the meaningful internal embellishment of these cues. We articulate these embellishments through speaking and writing – the “what I say” part of Weick’s recipe. In doing so, we reify and reinforce cues and their meaning, and add to our repertoire of retrospective experience.
Sensemaking is less a matter of accuracy and completeness than plausibility and sufficiency. We simply have neither the perceptual nor cognitive resources to know everything exhaustively, so we have to move forward as best as we can. Plausibility and sufficiency enable action-in-context.
The Sensemaking Triad
The natural byproduct of sensemaking is the constructs of narratives, frameworks, and models. Taken together, these form the basis of how we perceive the world. Together and separately, each of them helps us interpret information, organize it, and make some meaning from all the stimuli we’re receiving continuously. Yet, as helpful as they are, they have their limitations.
I’ll walk through each.
Narratives
Narratives have surrounded us since we could comprehend information. Our parents had their narratives, which were an amalgamation of beliefs, values, and experiences that they passed onto us. Our social and political leaders craft narratives to influence us to do one thing or another. We create narratives so that we can have a sense of certainty and reason in this world.
The value of a narrative is that it provides us a summation of a series of events in our life. It creates a story that we can latch onto and believe. They give us hope.
As the author N.T. Wright wrote in The New Testament and the People of God, a narrative has the power of shifting your paradigm.
“Tell someone to do something, and you change their life–for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life.”
Narratives align to three specific properties in the sensemaking process - people believe what’s plausible, not accurate. They tie them to their identity and search for their social acceptability. These properties make them so powerful and so dangerous.
Intrinsically social and personal, narratives can lead us astray if we identify with a worldview that is unrealistic and extremist. This often happens in political conversations, but is best illustrated by the emergence of cults.
Like politicians, cult leaders tell extremely compelling stories. As a result, they mobilize their followers into actions that align more with what the leader wants, rather than what makes sense.
Narratives are more implicit and subconscious sensemaking constructs, and therefore can be hard to detect. But, when we’re about to take action or even are ardently believing something. We should stop and ask ourselves - is this true? This simple question is illuminating. It will force us to self-reflect. It will open our eyes and force us to be judicious when continuing to or ending our belief in a narrative.
Frameworks
Frameworks emerge from a need to place information into intentional spaces. They are more deliberative and proven than narratives, yet not as reproducible as other constructs, like scientific models.
You are likely well aware of a few frameworks and already use them daily to get to a decision:
Listing options
Pro/cons of options
Listing out risks related to options
Taken together, they form a thorough framework. Taken independently, they suffice. Regardless, frameworks clarify things.
Shane Parrish provides an outstanding example of this in action at Farnham Street. In this article about his decision-making matrix, Parrish takes two frameworks and blends them:
The Eisenhower matrix - what’s urgent, what’s not; what’s important, what’s not
The Irreversibility principle - which decisions can be reversed and which can’t
As a result, he’s developed his decision matrix, which I’ve found rather helpful in daily decision-making.
This framework exemplifies how helpful categorizing and sorting options can be. Yet, the cost of this speed and efficiency is the potential loss of accuracy and unforeseen outcomes.
Models
Of all the sensemaking constructs we build, scientific models are the most accurate and actionable. They’ve been scientifically tested, debated, and mostly validated. We’ve used models to form accurate and actionable views of how the world works. Models have resulted in great inventions and discoveries. These are constructs that drive informed and accurate action.
Models describe natural phenomena which we use to construct tangible things. Often used by scientists, models are explanations of how the world works. They are used to communicate, describe, and build. In most cases, they are offered as mathematical constructs, but at many times, they take physical or just conceptual form.
A simple example of a model is the layers of the earth. As we’ve investigated the ground beneath our feet we’ve learned where we can build, where we can drill, where we shouldn’t even stand, and so on. This model has helped us find footing in an otherwise uncertain world.
Though helpful as constructs, models have the clearest limitations:
They are approximations - to be convenient, models approximate information
They miss details - some models are too big to include all the details of what they represent, hence they are incomplete
They aren’t 100% accurate - a model’s efficacy is mostly reliant on how easily it’s shared and understood, and as details get lost, models become simplified and lose their accuracy
Don’t forget about your gut
Sensemaking is a wonderful process that, when done, deliberately makes your world richer and clearer.
Though, as you make sense of the world through narratives, frameworks, and models, don’t become a slave to the constructs.
As Vincent Van Gogh once said:
“Two things that in my opinion reinforce one another and remain eternally true are: Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination, do not become the slave of your model; and again: Take the model and study it, otherwise your inspiration will never become plastically concrete.”
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